Complacency by Edward Minyard
What's It About?
This thriller exposes the perils of disregarding current global events and underestimating potential threats, drawing from the author’s experiences in emergency management and cybersecurity to create an unforgettable tale that illuminates both preparedness and inaction.“I don’t have room to post links to the obituaries of every person killed because they were complacent.”
Complacency. Ha — this book is anything but.
Complacency: One Man’s Story (Archway Publishing) by Edward Minyard is a lot of things. It is a novel, a harrowing story of cybersecurity, data breaches, crisis management and disaster response played at the highest levels on the global stage. It is a primer to protect yourselves and your families against outside, unsuspecting dangers in your everyday lives. But perhaps more than anything, it is a warning — a red alert in capital letters.
“Complacency,” writes Minyard. “It’s so comfortable. And easy to accept. It’s always there, lurking in the shadows of great successes and long periods of boredom. And complacency is not your friend.”
Preparedness is like insurance: You want the comfort of knowing it is there, but you hope to never need it. “ ‘Statistically speaking,’ they would say, ‘if it hasn’t happened to us yet, it probably won’t.’ But crises don’t follow statistics.”
Minyard should know. He has more than four decades as an expert in the field of security and risk management.
Chaos Within U.S. Borders
His fictional story about Michael Conrad’s efforts to manage a crisis and security breach on the global level almost seems like Minyard documenting his own life experience under the guise of his character. While the situations seem so dire and large in scope, his dialogue, terminology, technology, ability to lead a team, suspect everything and make split-second decisions provide for a harrowing storyline. Just the suggestion that something like what he is describing could be real might make readers uncomfortable but riveted at the same time.
The fictional story is quite complex and multipronged, tapping into the best of Minyard’s experience. In America’s humanitarian efforts to set up camps for refugees, at least before the onset of Covid, the result is thousands upon thousands of people having penetrated U.S. borders and now able on behalf of their native lands of Russia, North Korea, Afghanistan and other countries to wreak havoc upon the U.S. with security breaches, computer hacks, all-out rioting, attacks, violence and more.
“Michael had seen the chaos firsthand. And he had watched as the ‘organized chaos’ devolved into total chaos … But not even Michael was prepared for the challenges of this new global crisis.”
Minyard writes comfortably and convincingly within the confines of his unique and specialized world. He has the language down and shows us real-life interactions between characters to lead readers into a cold sweat. While the book is a thriller in its own right, the author comes to us with a greater purpose.
Enthralling Literature, Crucial Reminder
Complacency: One Man’s Story, writes former Military Intelligence Captain John I. Mitchell in the book’s Foreword, “serves as both an enthralling literary journey and a crucial reminder of the need for preparedness and resilience.”
In a world that is constantly changing and more volatile than ever, the need to get past complacency — for the sake of personal life and family, any business and corporate growth initiative, and on larger-scale social and political matters that require the highest training and personnel — can simply not be ignored.
Remember, crisis loves complacency.
About Edward Minyard:
Edward Minyard has over 40 years of experience in providing advisory services, with a keen focus on risk management, security, incident management and processes related to business continuity. His professional certifications include: Certified Business Continuity Professional (CBCP); Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control (CRISC)(Ret); Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) and others. He has been actively involved in providing leadership during some of the largest disasters ever to impact North America.
He is the author of After Disaster: An Insider’s Perspective from the Heart of Chaos, The Case and Decisive Judgment. Ed is a frequent speaker on the topics of crisis management and preparedness. He has keynoted conferences for the American Bankers Association, The Retail Industry Leaders Association, Loss Prevention Magazine and The International Association of Emergency Managers.
Ed is a Grandmaster (9th-degree black belt) in the art of Taekwondo and has been inducted into the Official Taekwondo Hall of Fame and the US Kido Black Belt Hall of Fame. He lives in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, with his wife Joy and their two insane pups, Tucker and Gunner.
